Product labeling is used in many fields to gain quick and reliable access to various information related to a product. Information includes content and composition of products, and details on a particular aspect of the product to name but a few. Product labeling can support managing automated or semi-automated systems, or can drive human-machine interface operational parameters. Furthermore, products are often supplied with authenticity validation information in order to attribute a product to a certain company, for example.
Customers producing high volumes of consumer products with an even higher volume of disposable or replaceable components have an interest in low cost and simple solutions which at the same time allow robust and reliable data acquisition and authentication of product information.
Traditionally, product labeling involves some sort of code marking which encodes data related to the product at hand. Cost and complexity are often compounded by the need of a dedicated reader to decode data encoded in the respective code marking. Such data validation systems can only be used with a particular code marking scheme and both labeling and hardware can be costly. For example, labels may involve radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers can often only be used with a given tag layout.